Spiritual Survival Guide
2: Read This If You’re Confused About Faith
one silver basin weighing seventy shekels . . . full of choice flour mixed with oil for a grain offering . . . one young bull, one ram, one male lamb a year old, for a burnt offering. Yeah, we feel your pain. Maybe it can help to start thinking of the Bible not only as a box full of scrolls but also like a newspaper, made up of all kinds of different sec- tions. Just flip through and you can find news articles, editorials, letters to the editor, personal ads, advertising supplements, human interest sto- ries, obituaries, comics, menus, stock listings, crossword puzzles, sports, business, advice columns, and so on. In a way, it’s a kind of jumble of things. We don’t read a menu, a sports story, and an advertisement in exactly the same way, do we? Not only that, each section of the newspaper is trying to get a different point across to different readers. Once you rec- ognize what section you’re holding, it’s easier to understand what you’re reading. In the same way, the Bible has a whole lot of different types and styles of writing. About 40 percent of it comes in story (or history) form. But beyond the great stories, there are all kinds of other things: proverbs (wise sayings), songs, poems, parables, letters, visions, genealogies (fam- ily trees), prophecies, legal requirements, ancient health and worship regulations, exhortation (encouragement), prayers, meditations, and proclamations (sermons). Each of these sections has been meaningful to certain people over the centuries. But just like sections of the Sunday paper, not every passage of the Bible will necessarily appeal or apply directly to you right now. That’s normal and to be expected. We’ve found that the most helpful course of action is (a) to recognize
Whatever version I might have, when I flip through it, it doesn’t seem like any other book I know. On the one hand the Bible is obviously a book; even the word bible comes from the Greek word biblos, meaning “book.” Part of the prob- lem might be what happens when we pick up a book like this one and start reading. When we were little we were taught to start on page one and read straight on through. There are obviously big advantages to reading a normal book this way. But with the Bible we often run into a lot of confusion and detours. And here’s part of the reason why: The Bible is more like a mini-library than a single book. The different sections of the Bible were written by many different people over the course of about a thousand years. Each of these different writers would be inspired by God to share something, and over time the community would add their scroll to the mix. Imagine a box holding all those different accumulated scrolls; that’s the Bible. When it became time to take that box of scrolls and combine them into a single book, they had to make decisions on how to order and group them. And that’s part of the reason that the Bible doesn’t read as smoothly as a single book written by a single person. There are gaps and overlaps, and a certain amount of jumping back and forth. Keep the image of a boxful of scrolls in mind, and it gets a little easier. Unpronounceable names. Weird-sounding rituals. Long lists of guys who have been dead for thousands of years. What’s that all about? Maybe you are talking about passages like Numbers 7:78: On the twelfth day Ahira son of Enan, the leader of the Naphtalites: his offering was one silver plate weighing one hundred thirty shekels,
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